Meeting mother

Maria Jastrzębska on seeing your parents as people

Maria Jastrzębska’s mother

Everything was a secret. I drank secrets with my mother’s milk. Or later, breathed them in with the adults’ smoke, as they talked and drank.

One day as a bored 13-year-old rifling through layers of bedding at the back of a shelf in the upstairs cupboard on the landing of my parents’ house — a West London semi — I feel a hard, rectangular object. I reach my hands deeper under the layers of the blankets until I can pull it out. It’s a black photo album with leather edging, bound with ties. I open it: pictures of a lake surrounded by birches, pictures of my grandparents and a few faces I don’t recognise. I’m about to put the album back but then, as I turn a page over, under the tissue paper, I stop.

There is my mother outside a church in what is clearly a horse-drawn wedding carriage. The carriage is drawn by two grey horses, driven by Highlanders in Polish regional costume — white wool trousers embroidered and edged with braid, pompoms on the end of the legs, woollen embroidered jackets, black felt hats with a band of seashells and a single feather. Under the page in the album, a place name, Rabka, a town on the slopes of the Górce Mountains. The date is 1937. Mama holds a bridal bouquet of white roses. She wears a white two-piece suit of crepe de chine over what looks like a silk blouse, a wide brimmed hat and heeled court shoes — all in white. She’s smiling.

But what makes me look through the pictures again and again is the handsome young man beside her. Here is the groom in his peaked cap with a crowned Polish eagle emblem and uniform, a dress sword at his side. He isn’t tall. He is not my father.

With excitement and a kind of glee, I make my way downstairs to confront my parents about this discovery. For all their insistence on being proper, my parents have guilty secrets! And I have caught them out! I am so pleased with myself. I’m also shocked and indignant that no one has told me anything. What do I really know about my parents?